January 10, 2025: Two Admin Opinions

Admin

By Andy Delaney

This week's post is going to be short because, as Polonious quipped in Hamlet, "Brevity is the soul of wit." I'm lazy. 

SCOV issued two opinions on Friday, January 10. 

Opinion one boils down to whether redacted records related to the use of restraint and seclusion on students are subject to a Public Records Act request or "categorically exempt from disclosure pursuant to the student records exception." The trial court found that the records, suitably redacted, were subject to such a request. SCOV disagrees concluding the latter position (categorically exempt) applies. The opinion has some administrative procedure, public policy, interest balancing, and statutory interpretation. While this is a unanimous opinion, it's one of those opinions that, in my view, illustrates how reasonable minds can differ in applying the law. The trial court's reasoning is not on-its-face unreasonable (nor is SCOV's categorical-exemption conclusion). Hier v. Slate Valley Unified School District, 2025 VT 2.

Opinion two is about whether the Department of Labor has the authority to promulgate a certain Workers’ Compensation and Occupational Disease Rule. Spoiler alert: it do. The issue is what constitutes concurrent employment for computation of a worker's average weekly wage worker's comp benefit. There's a statute to start (subsection (a)(4)). The Department of Labor has a rule that more or less says the calculation will include a second job if the worker is working a second job at the time of the injury or disability but won't include a job picked up after the injury (Rule 8.1500 in this document if you're curious) but left before the injury-caused disability (I'm being a little loose here, but that's the general idea). Claimant got a hernia and left his hernia-causing job shortly thereafter. He worked for two places for a while, and then he got surgery, which put him out of work. The debate here is whether the job claimant took after his injury but left before his surgery should be included in the calculation. The Department of Labor concluded that it should not under the rule. It further reasoned that the rule was a reasonable exercise of the Department's rulemaking authority, falling under its interpretive dance powers. SCOV agrees, and while it does note some areas of arguable conflict, ultimately SCOV defers to the Department's interpretation of its rules. Hill v. Agri-Mark, Inc., 2025 VT 3.